Is Your Project Ready For Scrum (Jane O'Shea)
Mar 14, 2010
Working alongside agile project management, Scrum is an incremental framework, which can lead to more efficient projects across a range of different sectors. It has gained popularity as a method of working and a large number of project managers are incorporating it into their project management. But are they fully ready for Scrum?
Most people in the PM field will have seen peers and colleagues hopping onto the scrum bandwagon, tempted by its straightforward practices without fully ascertaining whether they or their project is really ready for this method.
They lure of managing projects and producing cycles of work via daily meetings and ending up with a well functioning end product proves too much. After all who wouldn't want a simplified way of working?
So, we get a certified scrum master in place, get everyone behind the process, and make sure they understand it, and head into the Scrum sunset thinking how rosy everything will be.
Well not exactly! What some don't realise is that the software engineering side also needs to be geared up for Scrum in order for it to be truly successful. When the software isn't scrum ready, after a few sprints that go swimmingly well, you can hit a wall in productivity meaning you can't release the software when you wanted to, clients get angry and you decide that Scrum isn't as great as you thought.
In fact it isn't really the fault of the actual Scrum methodology, but the fact that it has been adopted without the application of other technical practices such as Continuous Integration or Test Driven Development. Scrum without these means your team can work faster, but this often doesn't equal increased quality. This highlights that the actual problem is that Scrum doesn't address the quality of the building of software and so if you don't apply other methods then the project will hit more problems.
So to sum up, no matter how well you adopt Scrum, if the software engineering isn't as ready as the people involved, then your project will have problems.
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